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March 2015

The Broadbent Institute is about ideas and action, so when we set out to organize our second annual Progress Summit months ago, we decided to begin a new tradition: the creation of annual awards recognizing the work of a great campaigner and an important thinker who have made significant contributions to building a better Canada.

This evening, we named the first recipients of the Charles Taylor Prize for Excellence in Policy Research and the Jack Layton Progress Prize. In its inaugural year, the Taylor Prize was presented by Broadbent Institute Chair, Ed Broadbent, to eminent...

Glance at just about any publication from the Fraser Institute and other conservative think tanks, and you will be told that too much government social spending and too much regulation of the job market damage growth and job creation. There is, we are told, an ineluctable trade off between social equity and economic efficiency.

Yet this does not readily show up in international comparisons. Germany and some Northern European countries have built

Economists love to talk about the theory of comparative advantage, which holds (somewhat counter intuitively) that two countries trading with each other will be better off if each specializes in what it does best, even if one country has an absolute competitive advantage in the production of all goods and services traded.

David Ricardo famously argued that it made sense for England to specialize in the production of cloth and Portugal that of wine, even though Portugal could produce both goods more cheaply.

Unfortunately, the theory has limited application to the real world,...